SAP Lumira is a great tool with a lot of possibilities. However, when it comes to the integration in an existing environment, there remain a few inconveniences.
Imagine an existing environment where several connected applications have been built with SAP Design Studio, based on SAP BW, which is reached through a SAP Netweaver portal, using single sign on.
Ideally, users should be able to work with Lumira desktop and easily access BW BEx query data, for which they are authorized already anyway. Unfortunately, single sign on is not supported in this case(!), thus Business Analyst are required to log on to retrieve the data. It is possible to make a connection to HANA views, single sign on supported, but HANA views need to be built and maintained as well, and require sometimes additional license fee.
Thus if you want to use your SAP Businesswarehouse with SAP Lumira, what are the options?
1. Give users passwords they can use to log on to the system (but they have already been spoiled with singe sign on and will have to do this every time from now on)
2. No access to BW query’s directly, so they can only use downloaded excel data, and data cannot be refreshed automatically
So no great choiches there.
Then when the business analyst has finished his story, based on several datasources, and wants to share his report, another challenge arises. To be able to share the report, he/she must save it on the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform, for which single sign on is not supported either. Also, the BusinessObjects platform is not the nicest looking environment, so in general it is better to keep business users away there.
An solution for the latter is to let the consuming business users access the report through an link. This can be organized for example using a consistent naming convention for the reports. But unfortunately these cannot be managed easily.
At the moment, SAP is working on Lumira 2.0. The vision of SAP is to have a better integration between SAP Design Studio and Lumira desktop. This sounds very promising. Hopefully single sign on will be working then as well in all the environments.
So for now the question is what to do. For the users to make better use of the datawarehouse, a tool as Lumira is essential. Unfortunately, the current version is not benefitting from the potential unique selling point it can have over its competitors, namely perfect integration within the platform.
To conclude: great visualizations and analyses can be done with Lumira desktop, but perfect integration on the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform has not been realized yet.
